Creative Interventions: Re-imagining the archive

Jo ElsworthUniversity of Bristol Theatre Collection

18 April 2023

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Background

• Accredited museum • 60+ years of collecting• Primarily archival• 3 staff, many volunteers• Open to all (c.3k p.a.)• Research driven• M&M ‘step-change’

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Research Museum Archive3

Archival material • Photographs, letters, scripts, papers, playbills, prompt copies, music etc.

Artwork •Paintings, designs, working sketches, engravings etc.

3D material• Costumes, objects, set models, props, ceramics, ephemera

A/V and digital•Film, sound, born-digital and digitised material

Books and journals

Range…

Map of London from Civitates Orbis Terrarum, published by G

Braun and F Hogenberg, 1572.

National Review of Live Art, 2009.

(All performances recorded on miniDV)

Theatre Collection: Vision

• Curate - a world class collection • Encourage - and enable it to be used for

research, education, enjoyment and inspiration by all those who wish to do so

• Catalyst - for new scholarly and creative work and new partnerships

Hence…• Artists in the Archive

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Case Study Projects

• Emergent artists - Tim Bishop and Eleanor Fogg

• Working with groups - Bristol Printmakers

• Artists and Researchers – Franko B and Cara Davies • Artist in Residence - Clare Thornton and Unfurl

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Emergent Artists – Inspired by the archiveTim Bishop: Water Action

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18 April 2023

•Undergraduate work•Performance •Documentation•Exploring issues of fake/real/history/now•Water Action now in TC archive

www.timbishopartist.com

Installation contents

6 photographs;2 DVDs;1 VHS tape;5 audio cassette tapes;3 handwritten A4 pages;3 found objects Numerous assorted photograph fragments;Theatre Collection Accession form;2 documentation photographs.

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Performance Documentation as Installation Art

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The Artist’s View…..My artistic practice has become much more considered...This awareness has also evolved into active engagements with the duration of works and provided stimuli for new works. For example, my recent moving image work “echoes of a dying medium” (2012) uses VHS tape to foresee its own eventual demise and technological obsolescence.

I now have much more of an idea of how archives can provide creative inspiration for new work, not just through the absent events that documents in the archive represent but also through the practices, systems, history and material objects of and in the archives themselves. This is the thing that surprised me the most.

I thought I would get the most inspiration to make new work from the excellent examples of work represented in the archives. But, instead, the biggest inspiration to my own work came from questioning the methods that had been employed, and are being employed, to represent these events.

Images and quotes from Tim Bishop (September 2013)

Emergent Artists – Inspired by the archiveEleanor Fogg: The 13 Books Written on the Skin

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Please follow the instructions below in preparation.

Your title is No. 10, 'The Book of Silence'.

1. Please write down a memory that is in some way connected to a part of your body. Your memory may be read out, but you will not be identified.

2. Select a section of the text, no more than 10 words long, to represent your memory on my body.

3. Do not send me this information, but bring it with you to the event.

4. Reply to this email telling me where on my body you think it would be most appropriate to document this memory.

5. Come to the internal entrance to the Theatre Collection at 10:30am on Monday 26th April. Bring the required information.